Designs that look forward to summer!

This is how last week's repeating pattern turned out and although it was a lot of work, I’m really quite pleased with it!

Mock Orange and Weigela Melamine Dinner Plate by helikettle

Once again, I had to spend a lot of time digitally ‘tidying up’ so that the repeats matched up perfectly. I just wish I could work out why, however meticulous I am in my measuring and in spite of taking a lot of care with the painting, I can’t seem to get the pattern repeats to line up exactly with one another first time around.

I think, though, that all the work was worth it and for the first time I succeeded in making a large enough image to cover the whole area of a Messenger Bag in one piece, in spite of warning notices about running low on memory popping up frequently at the bottom of my screen!

Mock Orange and Weigela Messenger Bag by helikettle

I seem to have turned very ‘flowery’ recently but that’s mainly because I’ve set out to design Birthday cards with at least one  for each month’s Birth Flower. 

This weekend I’ve made a start on a Water Lily design, one of the designated Birth Month Flowers for July.

The alternative for July is Larkspur, a lovely cottage-garden flower, that, sadly, refuses to grow in my garden! For years I’ve sown the seeds in the spring but they never even germinate. So this year I’ve given up – though I did think about trying them in a large tub until I realised that the less time I spend in my garden, the better, especially now that my pear tree is in bloom.

This photo was taken a couple of springs ago, before I had so much trouble with the pollen

I still have a lot of work to do on these lilies – the leaves and centres need some detail and then there's the text to add. Sometimes, choosing the font can take me as long as painting the design!

Until I searched for some reference photos, I didn’t realise how complicated and irregular their pattern of petals was!  I would have much preferred to have done one of my rather impressionistic pastel paintings of water lilies, avoiding too much detail. But unfortunately, Monet got there first and I wouldn’t want to appear to be plagiarising!

Once these water lilies are finished, I’m left with just two more Birth Month Flower designs to work on – Poinsettias for December (can’t quite get in the mood yet!) and Morning Glories for September. 

That’s one I’m very much looking forward to! I particularly like bright blue flowers and I succeeded in growing some in a pot last summer by placing the pot on my garden table out of reach of the slugs and snails, who seem to head straight for them at ground level. They didn’t bloom until well into the autumn but by then they made a very welcome, cheerful splash of colour as other flowers faded - and they remained 'glorious' all day, not just in the mornings!

I think the way that Morning Glories grow, twining themselves around anything they can reach, could make for a lovely repeating pattern. But will I be able to come up with a design that can equally well serve as a Birthday Card?

Hmmm. I’ll have to give that one some thought . . 

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